Stanisław Jasionowicz

The Anabases of Saint-John Perse and Zbigniew Herbert

This article deals with the motif of “anabasis” in the poetry of Saint-John Perse and the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert. The former, a poet and diplomat, gave this title to a poem written in the early 1920s, before he stepped onto the stage of international politics of the interwar period. It, in a way, anticipates his professional and existential choices. Herbert’s “Anabasis” appeared in 1983 in his collection of poems entitled Raport z oblężonego miasta [Report from a Besieged City]. Although two generations and vastly different geopolitical points of origin separate the authors of these poems, both writers left their “small homelands” (Guadeloupe, Lwów), to become witnesses to history filled with socio-political events in the face of which they could not remain neutral. Saint-John Perse began his own poetic “anabasis” in 1940, as an “exile” having escaped to the USA. Zbigniew Herbert published his “Anabasis” in a time when communist Poland would, once again (following the institution of Martial Law in 1981), would confirm his “internal exile.” Personal contexts aside, the “anabases” of Perse and Herbert represent a search for the “right word” which anticipates the script of existence or which is a meditation on exile, expressing through modern poetic means the desire to recover, or constantly (re)construct, their imaginative and spiritual homelands.

The article deals with the first of four stories in Eugène Demolder’s Quatuor. The motifs of the mask and hidden identity, mainstays of European culture, in the tale by the Belgian Symbolist writer flirt with the possibility of crossing boundaries in the quest for complete, untrammelled freedom. Presented from the perspective of a young, provincial dandy, the romantic game between a “rebellious” artist and a bewitching, masked stranger turns out to be a battle of wills between a shy, lovelorn seamstress
(a working class woman) and a bourgeois incapable of transcending his class prejudices. The references to Flemish mystics and alchemy scattered throughout the text imply that the protagonist might possibly experience a spiritual transformation if he takes a chance and “crosses boundaries”, but the denouement suggests his utter failure in this regard.
 

Smee: The hell or the paradise of history?

Charles De Coster’s story Smetse Smee, published in 1858 as part of his Légendes flamandes, centers on a popular motif from Flemish folklore. The motif of clever blacksmith who sells his soul to the devil and then successfully reclaims it occurs in the folk culture of many European countries. A leading promoter of Belgian national consciousness, De Coster creatively transforms the tale to relay the ideals of freedom close to his heart that nineteenth-century intellectuals often associated with peasant frankness and joie de vivre (which formed the backdrop for political debate between Belgian conservatives and liberals in the second half of the century). These traits are  juxtaposed with the demeanor of the “diabolical” opponents of these ideals, embodied in the story by the sixteenth-century suppressors of the protestant rebellion and considered to be “enemies of the people.” Is De Coster’s point of view merely testimony of by-gone conflicts, or does it reflect a moment in the process in which contemporary readers  of the tale of the brave valiant blacksmith from Ghent are still immersed in today?